Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words
to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce
diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree.
Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes
to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify
connections.

It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus!

Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.

The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.

No membership required.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s
WordNet, an opensource
database built by University students and language researchers. Combined
with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern
web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons
of the web.

The Visuwords™ Interface

To use the applet you only need to type a word into the search query at the top of
the page and press 'Enter'. A network of nodes or 'synsets' will spring out from the
word that you entered. A synset is essentially a single concept that is represented
by a number of terms or synonyms. Synonyms are words with different spellings that
convey the same idea. For example when you lookup "seem", you see that the word is
connected to four synsets each represented by a green circle. Green denotes verbs
so all of these synsets represent verbs. Two of these synsets have the lone word
"seem"; one has two terms: "appear" and "seem"; and the third has three terms: "look",
"appear" and "seem". Each of the four synsets has its own definition. Hovering over a node with the
mouse will reveal all of the synonyms for a given synset as well as its definition. Some synsets
will also show a few examples of usage. These synsets link to each other and to other synsets according
to entries in the WordNet database.

You can zoom the model in and out by rolling the wheel on your mouse. You can click the
gray background within the applet and drag the mouse in order to shift the whole model
around so you can explore. You can grab any node and pull it away from the others to clarify
connections.

Understanding the links between Synsets

"is a kind of" — hyponym/hypernym pair

With regards to "wheat" and "grain", we see a cyan link from "wheat" pointing towards "grain" we can
understand this to mean that wheat "is a kind of" grain. Here, "wheat" is a hyponym and "grain" is a hypernym.

In the case of verbs this same cyan link can be understood better by "is one way to". So, for example, to trot
"is one way to" walk.

"is an instance of" — hyponym/hypernym pair

In these relationships, the hyponym is specific and unique. For example, "Einstein" is an instance of a "physicist".

"is a member of", "is a part of", "is a substance of" — meronym/holonym pair

In these cases the meronym in some way belongs to the holonym. Examples: "robin" is a member of the "thrushes",
a "wheel" is a part of a "wheeled vehicle", "caffeine" is a substance of "coffee".